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A Liberal Asks… “But… What If Bush is Correct?”

Instapundit [1] notes Tom Junod in Esquire, this morning [2], admitting an undercurent I’ve started to detect in mainstream Democrats of late… and I don’t mean the “Bush is Hitler” crowd… I mean the people the Democratic Party is fast leaving behind them. Junod’s an unabashed leftist, but unlike most of them these days, he’s willng to give voice to what I think a Lot of Democrats… no… MOST Democrats are thinking:

“I didn’t know anything about the cadet. About President George W. Bush, though, I felt the satisfaction of absolute certainty, and so uttered the words as essential to my morning as my cup of Kenyan and my dose of high-minded outrage on the editorial page of the Times : “What an asshole.” . . .

Then I read the text of the speech he gave and was thrown from one kind of certainty—the comfortable kind—into another. He was speaking, as he always does, of the moral underpinnings of our mission in Iraq. He was comparing, as he always does, the challenge that we face, in the evil of global terrorism, to the challenge our fathers and grandfathers faced, in the evil of fascism. He was insisting, as he always does, that the evil of global terrorism is exactly that, an evil—one of almost transcendent dimension that quite simply must be met, lest we be remembered for not meeting it . . . lest we allow it to be our judge. I agreed with most of what he said, as I often do when he’s defining matters of principle. No, more than that, I thought that he was defining principles that desperately needed defining, with a clarity that those of my own political stripe demonstrate only when they’re decrying either his policies or his character.

As easy as it is to say that we can’t abide the president because of the gulf between what he espouses and what he actually does , what haunts me is the possibility that we can’t abide him because of us…because of the gulf between his will and our willingness.

What haunts me is the possibility that we have become so accustomed to ambiguity and inaction in the face of evil that we find his call for decisive action an insult to our sense of nuance and proportion.”

He’s hit it, freinds. He has hit on an unmoving truth, here, and one the far left has denied… and I think the DNC leadership with it. Who also, it seems, have gotten used to inaction and ambiguity, and after having had it for so long, perfer it.

Says Junod:

..The people who dislike George W. Bush have convinced themselves that opposition to his presidency is the most compelling moral issue of the day. Well, it’s not. The most compelling moral issue of the day is exactly what he says it is,..

…The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November—no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer—is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated. The first will always sound merely convenient when compared with the second. Worse, the gulf between the two kinds of certainty lends credence to the conservative notion that liberals have settled for the conviction that Bush is distasteful as a substitute for conviction—because it’s easier than conviction….

What he’s suggesting as a possibility, here is exactly what I’ve been firmly saying for a year now; All the Democrats have is stubborness and hatred to run on.

Well… Welcome to the adult world, kids.

It’s dangerous out here, and we can’t deal with it by hiding, anymore. In fact, it’s our hiding and thinking we can have peace by simply being inactive, that caused our problems in the first place. Unfortunately for the Democrats, the election of John Kerry would demonstrably lead us back to that inaction and ambiguity.